Tinka Bechert and Nils Kasiske

Opening : 11.03.2016, 6 p.m.

Introduction: Helene Bosecker

Exhibition : 11.03.2016 – 21.04.2016

Tinka Bechert´s work continuously shows a keen historic interest that she combines with process-oriented painting. The artist reinvents and re-invigorates historic sources in order to assemble current visual metaphors. A slightly askew or absurd realism emerges that describes the slippages in human perception.
Alongside her painting practice, Tinka Bechert has worked on ambitious collaborations with scientific institutions such as the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg). In exploring difference and commonalities in artistic and scientific methodologies, the artist explores the deep human need for reason as a common driving force- both in the arts and sciences.

Tinka Bechert was born and raised in Berlin, Germany but divides her time between Ireland and her native Berlin, having shown her work extensively across Europe, The UK, and Ireland. Tinka Bechert´s work is represented in many private and public collections such as the Office of Public Works, Ireland, the Central Art Archives/ National Library, Berlin, Germany and Tate Britain, London.

As sculptor, painter and illustrator Nils Kasiske embodies with his overlapping of genres and mediums the inherent meaning of his works: the individual finds himself exposed to a world neatly organized in compartments and tries to carve out an Individual Being amidst the overflow of product and sterile Brand Identities. This living at the confines between social acceptance, belonging and the need to be self- fulfilled, forces the searching individual, more often than not, to adopt superficial features that mimic singularity but that on closer inspection lose themselves in a mainstream majority. Kasiske gives these paradoxes of everyday life a perspective in which tragedy mirrors comedy: the suicide of a Billionaire becomes the ultimate victory of capitalism; the impassive Bird in his nest made of wires becomes an expression for a boring superfluity. The single being and the society as a phenomenon will have to choose their destiny between Rebellion and inaction, Power and powerlessness.